‘Til Madness Do Us Part announced Wang Bing as the authentic heir to Frederick Wiseman with its gripping, shape-shifting portrait of an isolated “asylum” whose exact mission remains troublingly unclear throughout the film’s almost four-hour length. Simultaneously prison, hospital and refuge, the unnamed institution is peopled by a sprawling community of patients/inmates who range from the clearly insane to incarcerated petty criminals to others who have been simply deposited by families unable to care for their weakest or eldest members. Shot over the course of two-and-a-half months, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part takes place almost entirely within a single all-male floor of the asylum, resulting in a film that restores the true meaning of the term immersive now used too frequently to superficially describe contemporary moving image art. Following Wang’s restless, gliding camera, the viewer drifts through the asylum, gently observing but never privileging any of the men who drift, tranquilized, stunned, sleepless, lost. Never settling upon a single figure, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part is instead a choral and decentered film that tests our roles as privileged viewers and as extensions of the cinema’s surveillance apparatus. So engrossed, so immersed are we that a sudden burst of freedom becomes disorienting, unnatural, as we realize that we have become accustomed to the fluid enclosure of the asylum, where night is day and day is night.